Wrinkles, Flows, and Leopard Spots, Oh My!!
Enceladus raw images are now posted on the JPL raw images page with resolutions from 170 m/pixel down to 60 m/pixel. Up close, Enceladus looks just plain weird, with terrain that looks like Europa, Ganymede, Miranda, Dione, and Ariel. Below I've posted links to a few of my favorites. Certainly feel free to comment on these.
- Bifrucating ridge at 70 m/pixel
- Cryoflow with leopard spots?
- Europan-style terrain cross-cut by new, deep fracture
- Another cryoflow?
- Mirandian style terrain on right
- Okay...I'm lost, but that's a good thing
posted by Jason Perry at 9:34 AM
5 Comments:
Perhaps it's just me, but the raw images for Enceladus don't have the dust rings the images for Titan do.
That's because the Enceladus images have far better signal to noise compared to the Titan images. Enceladus is very bright while Titan is quite dark at 938 nm due to ISS's lower response at that wavelength and the fact that Titan is well...dark at 938 nm.
Every time I look at Enceladus, I find myself wondering just *what* happened there? The surface isn't uniformly altered. Was it due to variation in the heat source, or inhomogeneity in the materials?
I thought it was interesting to note that some of the craters that, at Voyager resolution, appeared to have central mounds, now appear to be partially filled by viscous flow from the outside.
Those ridges remind me if the one on Iapetus, how high are they? Leopard spots: could they be caused by geysers or some sort of explosive volcanism?
alan
Not 13-20 km that's for sure. The ridges are likely on the order of a few hundred meters tall to a kilometer.
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